The team
Julia Bailey (lead)
Mayra Salazar Volkmann, Haoyue Guo, Kara Smythe (support).
Department
Research Department of Primary Care and Population Health
What happened?
This project is a module review for the iBSc Sexual Health module, which took a decolonising lens to look at sexual health in social contexts, meaning to acknowledge and remove the influences of colonialism in knowledge construction. To review our approach to decolonising medical education, we started this project in 2021 and received support from the Changemakers grant to disseminate our results. To gather data, we reviewed literature in the field and interviewed the session facilitators of the module, students, and the module lead. With their views and opinions, we were able to reflect on how decolonisation was perceived in sexual health education, what went well with our attempt to bring the element of decolonisation to the class, and what can be improved. We have shared our findings with departmental staff and PhD students through a workshop, and we have plans to further the impact of this piece of work through blogs, journal articles, and seminars.
What advice or encouragement would you give to someone thinking of doing a ChangeMakers project?
Time management and distribution of workload is absolutely key for teamwork. Since we already collected data before getting changemakers funding, we initially thought time wouldn’t be a problem. However, we finished analysis and preparation for dissemination just in time and it was only achieved because we set clear deadlines and divided up work clearly.